Argentina, like most of Latin America, is a hotbed of Marxist “Liberation Theology” (Obama is an adherent of the racist version, Black Liberation Theology). But does Francis I subscribe to it? Unfortunately, the reports are contradictory and somewhat cryptic.

Said Cardinal Bergoglio in said speech that “The economic and social crisis and the consequent increase in poverty has its causes in ways policies inspiredneoliberalism considering profits and market laws as parameters, to the detriment of the dignity of individuals and peoples. In this context, we reiterate the conviction that the loss of the sense of justice and lack of respect for others have worsened and led us to a situation of inequity. ” Later stressed the importance of “ social justice “, the” equal opportunity “damage” transfers of capital abroad, “which should be required” distribution of wealth “, said the damage of economic inequalities and the need to “prevent the use of financial resources is shaped by speculation,” especially in the context of the “social debt”-which in his opinion is of eminently “moral” – is to reform “economic structures” in expressed the sense before.

Again, I may have lost something in the translation, but it appears the new Pope fails to understand markets and holds the concepts of social justice, equal opportunity and distribution of wealth, as important. Concepts which, of course, generally lead to advocacy of much government intervention and much central planning. It as though the new Pope has somehow given up on the good in people, and perhaps even in God, and has decided to replace both with a central role for the coercive state.

The change that swept Eastern Europe in the 1980s and fueled the collapse of the Soviet Union may find itself repeated by a new pope with similar disdain for the authoritarian governments of his region.

When Cardinal Karol Wojtyla stepped out on the balcony of St. Peter’s in 1978 as Pope John Paul II, Soviet communism still stood astride Eastern Europe and his native Poland.

He would be the moral force helping to lead half a continent out of the human bondage of totalitarianism.

Argentina’s 76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now Pope Francis I, is no stranger to — or compromiser with — the oppression of authoritarian government.

During his tenure as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and head of Argentina’s Conference of Bishops, the new pope had a strained relationship with the governments of President Cristina Kirchner and her late husband, former President Nestor Kirchner, who once called Bergoglio “a real spokesman for the opposition.”

The cardinal who eschewed limousines to ride his bicycle or take the bus, is known as a man of the poor and of the people.

He gained admiration for living in a modest apartment instead of the palace in Buenos Aires that was adjacent to the Casa Rosada where the president resides (and where Juan and Evita Peron often harangued the Argentine people).

The new pope has fought a long battle in Argentina against leftist government, Peronist anticlericalism, the spread of evangelical Protestantism and the secular temptations of modern society.

Like Pope John Paul II, he is likely to resist calls to “modernize” the church, to make it more “popular” and “appealing.”

Like Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis is a strong opponent of what is called “liberation theology,” a bizarre mix of Marxism and Catholicism often embraced by left-leaning politicians and clerics in Argentina and elsewhere in the hemisphere.

Rosendo Fraga, a well-known Argentine political analyst, told the Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer that Pope Francis “is definitely bad news for the Argentine government. His homilies, as recently as two weeks ago, were very critical of economic and social conditions, and of corruption in Argentina.”

“Francis may become a critic of governments such as those in Venezuela, Ecuador or Bolivia, in the same way that John Paul II became a critic of communism in Eastern Europe,” says Daniel Alvarez, a professor of religious studies at Florida International University.

[T]o be sure, South American governments are, with certain exceptions, nothing like the monolithic, totalitarian USSR.

Moreover, Pope Francis I is not as young as Pope John Paul II. Nor does he have a Ronald Reagan and a Margaret Thatcher to work with.

Even so, he does provide a rallying point for a region beset by authoritarianism that badly needs one.

Earlier in his homily, the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics decried “hotbeds of tension and conflict caused by growing instances of inequality between rich and poor“.

The idea that economic inequality is the root of most conflict is a Socialist idea, not a Biblical one. The Bible makes it clear that man’s sinful nature is the source of mankind’s broken relationships and conflicts.

Also, the Pope appears to mistakenly assume that economic inequality is automatically a form of injustice which creates resentment, not recognizing that poor people are not made poorer by other people getting richer, because wealth is not a zero-sum game. Any resentment over inequality is either based in envy, or anger over being cheated and exploited (in which case, it is the dishonest manner in which the wealth was gained, not the wealth disparity itself, which is the problem).

He also denounced “the prevalence of a selfish and individualistic mindset which also finds expression in an unregulated capitalism, various forms of terrorism and criminality”.

Funny how Socialists believe that it is “selfish” for people to want to keep what they earn, but neglect to recognize selfishness in those who demand that money be taken from those who earned it and given to themselves (who didn’t earn it). The Bible has a word for that, however: theft.

Also, Socialists denounce any rejection of collectivist control over goods and services as “individualist” and selfish, completely ignoring the fact that God Himself established private property rights when he gave the 10 commandments, including “Do not covet” and “Do not steal.”

Socialists also assume that pure Capitalism is an “unregulated,” winner-takes-all affair. Nonsense! True Capitalism requires law and order to make sure that all transactions are conducted honestly and voluntarily, without coercion or deceit. Free enterprise is not anarchy. Nor is it a form of “terrorism and criminality.”

Guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Pope completely misses these points. He’s a former Nazi youth, after all, and like most Germans has never fully rejected the Welfare State or many of the other Socialist underpinnings of the Nazi party. Also, like most Christians across the theological spectrum, he has never studied Biblical Economics.

Even more sadly, millions of Catholics are fighting for religious liberty against the very kinds of oppressive Socialist governments the Pope is supporting with these statements. At a time when he should be denouncing abuses of government power, he denounces the “individualism” of those fighting for their God-given rights of economic and religious liberty instead.

More than 450 Southern Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers with some 45 units from nine Baptist state conventions were activated in at least six states affected by the storm. […]

International relief organization Samaritan’s Purse is also helping victims of Hurricane Sandy at three locations in New Jersey. Bases have been established in Atlantic, Bergen and Ocean counties, areas that were hardest hit by the storm.

“These people are just devastated and need help,” Samaritan’s Purse president Franklin Graham said.

“We’re looking forward to reaching out to the homeowners who’ve been so devastated by this disaster,” said Tony McNeil, Samaritan’s Purse program manager in Atlantic County. “We want to them to know that God loves them and He hasn’t forgotten them. We’re here to remind them of that.”

Chaplains from the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team also are in New Jersey, helping to assess and finding people in need, and providing spiritual comfort.

The Churches of Christ sent three truckloads of supplies for distribution. Mainline denominations like the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) have also launched massive relief efforts.

In a disaster the magnitude of Sandy, anyone who brings help deserves praise; to that extent the Occupy movement has offered legitimate aid to people and deserves credit. That being said, Occupiers haven’t received this much positive press since… well, the birth of the Occupy movement itself.

The Huffington Post reads, “Occupy Sandy Emerges As Relief Organization For 21st Century, Mastering Social Networks.” On Public Radio station WNYC’s blog, the headline is, “Occupy Sandy: With a Hurricane, a Movement is Reborn,” and the story declares, “After disappearing from both the political conversation and the streets of New York City, the Occupy movement is back.”

[I]t’s good that Occupy Sandy is lending a hand, but the media coverage they are receiving is disproportionate when compared to the work of religious groups. A left-wing group doing the work is apparently much more newsworthy than a religious group doing the same in the view of reporters and editors.

The mainstream media has now set the stage for the triumphant return of Occupy protests in 2013, just as the legislative battle to avoid taking America off the fiscal cliff is about to heat up. Sandy may be over, but the Occupy storm is just beginning.

Tampa police said Tuesday that they confiscated pipes, bricks, and other “suspicious” items from the rooftop of a downtown building located just a mile from where next week’s Republican National Convention will be held.

Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor said she believes the items were put there by protesters for use during RNC demonstrations. She added that some RNC-related graffiti was also found at the building, but wouldn’t elaborate.

However, Fox13 reported the graffiti featured the now-familiar “Anonymous” logo.

“It is disconcerting but it’s not surprising,” she said. “This is normally how things proceed leading up to a large event.”

Documents obtained by Judicial Watch confirm that somebody in the White House told officials with the General Services Administration (GSA) to “stand down” and not arrest Occupy Portland protestors who may have broken the law last year.

Former GSA Public Buildings Service Commissioner Robert Peck told a senior Department of Homeland Security official that the federal housekeeping agency had been instructed by the Obama White House to go easy on the Occupy protestors.

In a Nov. 6, 2011, DHS/National Protection and Programs Directorate Chief of Staff Caitlin Durkovich asked GSA’s Peck if it was true that his agency had asked Federal Protective Service officials not to take action against the Occupy Portland protestors.

“Yes, that is our position,” Peck responded. “It’s been vetted with our Administrator and Michael Robertson, our chief of staff, and we have communicated with the WH [White House], which has afforded us the discretion to fashion our approach to Occupy issues…The arrests last week were carried out despite our request that the protesters [sic] be allowed to remain and to camp overnight…”

More than eight months after Occupy Wall Street burst onto the global stage, decrying income inequality and coining the phrase “We are the 99 percent,” the movement’s survival and continued relevance is far from assured. Donations to the flagship New York chapter have slowed to a trickle. Polls show that public support is rapidly waning. Media attention has dropped precipitously.

Bursts of violence, threats of municipal chaos and two alleged domestic terror plots have put Occupy on a recurring collision course with law enforcement.

Even its social media popularity, a key indicator of the strength of a youthful movement, has fizzled since its zenith last fall.

National electoral successes – the legacy of the Tea Party, the other major American grassroots movement created in recent years – are not even on the agenda of the famously leaderless organization.

While the movement’s signature triumph has been to draw worldwide attention to income inequality in America and elsewhere, some who are sympathetic say it has nevertheless failed a crucial test of social movements: the ability to adapt and grow through changing tactics.

Jesus Was A Commie. That’s the title of actor Matthew Modine’s short documentary film that’s been winning film festival awards and critical acclaim.

In Jesus Was A Commie, Modine, who wrote, directed, acted, and narrated the film, says:

According to the Bible, Jesus and his followers chose to own nothing, and shared their belongings. There were no needy people among them. Those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, put it at the Apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. By this definition, Jesus and his followers were communists.

“I think that you could define [Jesus] as a Utopian communist, where people would work together to solve our problems,” he told The Christian Post, in a recent interview. Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Married to the Mob, Vision Quest, and the soon-to-be-released Batman film, The Dark Knight Rises) further remarked: “The film is not so much about Jesus or communism, but it’s about cooperation.”

Mr. Modine, like so many other Hollywood leftists and their harder-core Marxist-Leninist brethren, would like to have it both ways. They want to co-opt Jesus Christ and Christianity as their own when it serves their purposes, while at the same time denouncing essential Christian beliefs (especially on issues of sexual morality) and orthodox Christian believers as the real impediment to the realization of paradise on earth.

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA), naturally, finds Modine’s new film “inspiring,” and uses it in a live-stream online video of a recent presentation entitled, Was Jesus a Communist? (Pictured above) The program featured Communist Party functionary Roberta Wood as host, along with Rev. Tim Yeager and Pat Flagg as the commentators.

Rev. Yeager, of Grace Episcopal Church in Oak Park, Illinois, is Chairperson of the Communist Party USA’s Religion Commission. Pat Flagg is a member of the Commission. Yeager is also Financial Secretary/Treasurer of the National Organization of Legal Services Workers, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local Union 2320. In addition to his national CPUSA and union activism, Yeager is also an activist in Chicago-area politics, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A capsule of some of Yeager’s more noteworthy communist and leftist activities is provided on Keywiki, the very useful data site of New Zealand researcher Trevor Loudon.

In a friendly interview with People’s World, official news publication of the CPUSA, Yeager further expounded on the Modine film and his own dialectical synthesis of Christian-Communist unity.

“Jesus called upon his people to be bold for justice,” Yeager told People’s World. “He says the same thing that Karl Marx says at the end of the Communist Manifesto: fear not, stand up, move into this new era, be free, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The Modine film fits in well with The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, which the Left has high hopes of using to reinvigorate the effort of the 1960s to draft Jesus as the leader of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard. A prime example of this liberation theology recrudescence is Occupy Faith NYC, which has brought together many of the veteran leftist church activists to provide OWS a sham Christian face. Judson Memorial Church and Riverside Church, two of Manhattan’s longtime centers of Marxist agitation posing as Christian activism, have been in the forefront. Prominent among the Occupy Faith NYC clergy are Senior Minister Stephen H. Phelps of Riverside Church, Rev Michael Ellick and Rev. Donna Schaper of Judson Memorial Church, Feminist Activist Theologian Dr. Rev. Rita Nakashima Brock, Unitarian Universalist Rev. Jeremy D. Nickel, openly homosexual Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow. Rabbi Waskow is better known for political activism than spiritual depth, having been a key founding member of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), one of the most influential centers of Marxist activity over the past five decades.

One of the most eminent “Marxist-Christian” OWS spokesmen is Cornel West, Princeton University’s fiery professor of philosophy. Dr. West, a frequent speaker at the communist Brecht Forum in New York City, is fond of referring to himself as ”a Jesus-loving black man.” However, it is difficult to listen to his vitriolic, anti-capitalist rants without getting the notion that his appeals to Christianity are merely intended to make his Marxist message more acceptable to a wider audience. Over the past year, West has been on a national speaking tour with Carl Dix (see here and here) a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), a fanatical Maoist organization notorious for violent street confrontations.

Mao Zedong, hero to the RCP, earned unparalleled infamy as the greatest mass murderer in history. Many of those he killed were, of course, Christians, and his successors now running the Communist Party of China continue his legacy of jailing, torturing, and murdering Chinese Christians. Prof. West and many of the other “Christian Marxists,” apparently prefer to identify with the Communist murderers rather than the Christian martyrs, the oppressors rather than the oppressed.

The Communist regimes in Moscow and Beijing provided Fidel Castro with instructions on dealing with Christians, which in Cuba meant the Catholic Church. Mao’s representative, Comrade Li Wei Han of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1959, sent a communiqué to Castro’s new Communist regime explaining the subversive approach to “converting” Christians to Communism. Comrade Li wrote:

The line of action to follow against the Church is to instruct, to educate, to persuade, to convince, and, gradually, to awaken and fully develop the political conscience of Catholics by getting them to take part in study circles and political activities. By means of these activities, we must undertake the dialectical struggle within religion. Gradually, we will replace the religious element with the Marxist element.

Of course, Castro faithfully employed these methods — along with the customary Communist practice of outright persecution for those “uncooperative” Christians who insisted on following the Gospel according to Mark rather than the gospel according to Marx.

Castro and other Marxist-Leninists look to the first Soviet dictator V. I. Lenin for guidance on all matters. Lenin, in his 1905 work,Socialism and Religion took to task those outspoken Communists who alienated potential Christian allies by publicly brandishing their atheism and their contempt for religion. Lenin wrote:

It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods… That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party.

Lenin was speaking then as one who was not yet in power, as one who needed to use unwitting Christians as allies to attain power. That was a public utterance aimed at assuaging concerns that Communists are hostile toward religion. Privately, in a 1913 letter to the famous Russian author Maxim Gorky, Lenin left no doubt as to his own prejudices, calling even the idea of god “unutterable vileness.” According to Lenin:

Every religious idea, every idea of a god, even flirting with the idea of god is unutterable vileness of the most dangerous kind, “contagion” of the most abominable kind.

Once he had attained power, Lenin could afford to be more candid. In his 1920 instructions, Tasks of the Youth Unions, Lenin writes:

For a Communist, morality as a whole consists of total discipline and solidarity [with the cause] in the struggle against the exploiters…. Any morality that is taken outside its class conception we totally repudiate…. Morality is completely subordinated to the interests of the proletarian class struggle.

Writing to Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgy Chicherin in 1921 Lenin stressed the Communist virtues of lying and deception: “Telling the truth is a bourgeois prejudice. Deception, on the other hand, is often justified by the goal.”

The Communists and their allies and Christian dupes have been religiously following Lenin’s gospel of lies and deception ever since.

You cannot understand the left if you do not understand that Leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some Left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in Leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.

One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and, of course, Big Government are leftwing angels. And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the left fear big corporations but not big government? The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20-30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca Cola kill five million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?

Whatever bad big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.

How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.

Religious Christians and Jews also have some irrational beliefs, but their irrationality is overwhelmingly confined to theological matters; and these theological irrationalities have no deleterious impact on religious Jews’ and Christians’ ability to see the world rationally and morally. Few religious Jews or Christians believe that big corporations are in any way analogous to big government in terms of evil done. And the few who do are leftists.

That the Left demonizes “Big Pharma,” for instance, is an example of leftwing thinking. America’s pharmaceutical companies have saved millions of lives, including millions of leftists’ lives. And I do not doubt that in order to increase profits, they have not always played by the rules. But to demonize big pharmaceutical companies while lionizing big government, big labor unions and big trial law firms, is to stand morality on its head.

There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things.

[…] It is noteworthy that none of the twentieth century’s monsters — Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao — were preoccupied with material gain. They loved power much more than money.

And that is why the left is much more frightening than the right. It craves power.

After unleashing a crime wave on U.S. cities, the Occupy movement has descended into actual terrorism, as arrests in Chicago show. This is no longer the work of a fringe, but a shadowy group with political sponsorship.

Three men at the heart of the Occupy movement in Miami were charged Friday with conspiracy to commit terrorism near the NATO summit in Chicago. Mixing up Molotov cocktails, their big plan was to hurl firebombs at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home, President Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, a police station and various Chicago banks.

“Ever see a cop on fire?” one of the punks asked shortly before he was arrested. After news of that broke, Occupy Chicago took to Twitter to defend the three, calling the arrests state intimidation of “activists.”

It wasn’t the only incident in Chicago: Two other terrorist-wannabes were busted for plotting to make pipe bombs to hurl at the NATO summit.

They may have all been amateurs, but it follows another incident in Cleveland just weeks ago. Three Occupy terrorist-wannabes were caught trying to detonate a bomb on a city bridge. At their arraignment, Occupy protestors showed up in large numbers to support them.

Make no mistake: This is a pattern. Wherever Occupy goes, terrorism follows. Occupy practices no moral hygiene, as Bill Buckley used to put it, and accepts every freak who joins them in a way the Tea Parties never did.

It’s a textbook example of how terrorist movements everywhere get started — as protests of discontent with ill-defined goals in an atmosphere of illegality, with little effort to use the democratic process.

All the same, they draw political support from ambitious political leaders with otherwise unsalable ideas.

In Occupy’s case, support came from President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and various city officials who coddled them.

Unfortunately, too many Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, have been seduced by the heresy that Jesus was a Socialist and would define “justice” in Marxist terms – namely, “redistribution” (read: theft) of wealth.

It has not happened overnight. It has been a long time coming, and as this grieving husband observes, is largely due to the fact that the church first ceded education to the state, giving government the power to shape the hearts and minds of our nation’s children. Since then, many charitable duties of the church have been ceded to the Welfare State. Most recently, Obamacare threatens to drive Catholic charities out of the health care industry altogether and leave patients entirely at the mercy of bureaucrats – all with the help of Socialist bishops who demanded “universal health care” via the state.

Will the church stand up and repent of ceding its Biblical responsibilities to the idolatrous, Messianic Welfare State?

Once the Catholic Church sold out to secular providers of medical care, it inexorably entered the numbers game. From the most humane of endeavors, next to leading souls to Christ, the Church lost her heart. As Pope Benedict XVI said in his first encyclical, charity is the heart of the Church. All is done for God, of course, but to add to the souls saved for the beatific vision — eternal life in the company of God and the angels — and the rest of the saints, acts of charity in His name must be performed, not out of a dry sense of duty, but of love. As Jesus said, we must love each other for Him. Bureaucrats cannot love except as an adjunct to what they do.

The ‘system’ must come first! […]

It all started more than 100 years ago when private, mostly Church-run charities helped the poor, the sick and the elderly who had inadequate family help. Not so many patients even went to hospitals back in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Most care was local and run by volunteers. Many thought it inadequate, though with the Industrial Revolution, national wealth was growing so that there was growing surplus out of which individuals could fund private charities and health and education efforts, even as forces gathered to shoulder aside all such private, especially Church-run, efforts in favor of what has become the welfare state and socialism.

The Catholic Church never ‘got it’ regarding free market capitalism. Rather than restrict their much justified criticism to often wicked capitalists who abused employees and often other capitalists as well, popes and bishops went after ‘unfettered’ capitalism and ‘minimalist’ government itself as immoral and violative of Church teaching and, at least by implication, the Bible itself. This in spite of our constitutionally-limited government being what made possible both a highly moral society and enough surplus wealth to fund the very charities the Church insisted be run by government.

As the Catholic French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville had made clear in 1832, and which evidently Catholic leadership ignored, it was limited government that strengthened faith, family and individual industry that was revolutionizing how a nation took care of its poor, its elderly and sick. To be sure, it was far from perfect. Like under capitalism itself, there were gaps and even evils that caused many to suffer. But those were caused by sinful men, not the ‘system.’

The Church had, of course, been growing in building schools and hospitals, but the importation of capitalism-hating European ideologies had infected Church leadership as it had American academe and media in general. They had long before begun to ask government for help with schools as a ‘fairness’ issue: After all, if it was fair for, say, Boston to fund Protestant schools, then why shouldn’t Catholic schools get the same share of taxpayer dollars?

The fault lay in accepting character-forming government schools in the first place. Jefferson’s (and others’) huge error was in calling for government education. They may not have gotten the idea from Prussia, after her defeat at the hands of the French, for forming good citizen-soldiers, but it was a bad idea. Giving the government a near-monopoly over the minds and hearts of children attacks family and Church.

The usual excuse, as it is with health care, education and so forth, is that society is inadequate to the task. Most early settlers were homeschooled, steeped in the Bible and characters formed by family and Church. By the early 1800s that began to change, and the seeds for our moral and intellectual destruction were cast. It may seem quite a leap to make between early education and the killing of potentially millions through Obamacare. But making the government into our savior began with the government teaching most of us.

There would always be a struggle between the various forces in any society. Between family, Church, other private nonprofit making associations, growing non-family economic and cultural forces, and government itself, it can be seen now that faith and family, bolstered by Church and Church-run charities, had no chance. Not, certainly, when leadership dropped the ball over time. True, Church institutions continued to grow into at least the mid-20th century. But the rot had set in. Leaving aside the gory details, suffice it to say leaders seemed to have lost a genuine faith in Church tradition as well as our Lord’s dictates in the Bible. They put more and more in the hands of what has become all-powerful government.

Bishops had called for socialized medicine as early as 1917, joining forces with world socialism. They had finally gotten their wish with Obamacare. Ah, but the devil — Obama — lies in the details. It is like the woman who wakes up finding herself more than a little bit pregnant and abandoned by her lover. Too late, she utters: ‘But you said you would respect me in the morning!’

Our problem is that our bishops are unalloyed Marxists first and Christians second. Am I unfair? Surely not all are Marxists. Okay, so where is the outcry against their fellow faithless and even apostate bishops by the faithful ones? Only a few, like Cardinal Burke, even by implication condemn them. The time is long past for this heretical idolatry of clericalism to end. God may have arguably appointed even the worst among them for a purpose, even as He appointed Judas. I am not a theologian, so don’t pick on me here! I say we have bad bishops for a reason: for us junior Catholics to rise up against and demand their reform or removal!

Otherwise we face the ongoing killing of the innocents, the unborn, the helpless, the elderly — tens of millions of souls of which our bishops have thrown over the side by their apostasy, their refusal to attend to our souls and bodies, by the very socialism/Marxism the bishops have embraced at the expense of the Church and Catholics and others as well.

An Egypt-styled “Arab Spring,” which has put radicals in charge of the government, will be launched in the United States this spring with a war on “corporate power, Wall Street greed and the political corruption of the 1 percent,” according to the group headed by former Obama green aide Van Jones.

“They’re really not going to like the 99 percent Spring,” said Rebuild the Dream in an organizing email Friday.

Comparing the collection of protests last year that are symbolized by the 99 percent campaign and Occupy movement, to those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., the group said that “we were all inspired by the protesters of the Arab Spring who stood up to totalitarian governments, and inspired the Occupy movement here in America.”

The plan for now is to hold protest training sessions around the nation next week. Over 900 are scheduled so far.

Once ready, the group and dozens of others, notably MoveOn.org and labor unions, will launch the “99 Percent Spring” offensive against government and financial centers.

Called “the 99 percent go to spring training,” the segment revealed a massive plan led by Van Jones to train over 100,000 young people to engage in acts of massive civil disobedience throughout the country. It was a television version of The Nation’s April 2nd issue, devoted to different scenarios for reviving the OWS movement. The introductoryarticle by Richard Kim, the magazine’s executive editor, outlined the possibilities. Kim writes:

Occupy’s working groups are as busy as they were in the fall. Occupy Our Homes has resisted foreclosures and evictions in dozens of cities across the country. Occupy the SEC filed a public comment on the Volcker Rule urging regulators to strengthen this aspect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. Other groups have been hard at work on issues ranging from student debt to alternative banking to worker-owned cooperatives. Meanwhile, protests—against police brutality; against corporations like Bank of America, Pfizer and Walmart; against budget cuts; and against institutions like the Whitney Museum—have continued at an almost frenetic pace. Organizers have also been using the winter to incubate grander plans, among them a May 1 Day of Action that may turn into a call for a nationwide general strike and proposals to occupy corporate shareholder meetings, the NATO summit in Chicago, and the Democratic and Republican conventions at the end of the summer.

The solitary conservative on the panel, Josh Barro, raised the obvious point. When Martin Luther King, Jr. engaged in mobilization for peaceful civil disobedience, he was doing so against states in our own union that deprived African-Americans of basic civil rights, enforced segregation, and embarrassed the United States throughout the world. By juxtaposing the peaceful protest of non-violent citizens with the police state tactics of Southern police in highly segregated states, he brought pressure on Congress to act on behalf of all the people, not just Southern whites who benefited from segregation. He exposed the hypocrisy which revealed that the principles embedded in the Constitution were not enjoyed by African-Americans a century after the end of the Civil War.

What such principles are being violated by the Whitney Museum, the Pfizer company, Wal-Mart, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the political conventions of the Democratic and Republican parties? Yes, we know the answer: they are all either basic institutions of our democratic system — or corporations, which, by the Left’s definition, are inherently evil and oppressive institutions. As two of The Nation writers candidlyexplain the real goal: “the heart of the movement desires a different society.” That goal, although they do not name it as they used to in the old days, is revolutionary socialism, or the creation of Communism as the real agenda of the movement.

Supporting mob frenzies and civil unrest is not leadership. History teaches us it’s the kind of behavior that dictators encourage in order to grab more power. Real leaders aren’t interested in fomenting this kind of unlawful behavior.

In another historic first, President Obama’s backers are actively whipping up mobs. Not just the Occupoopers of Wall Street, but also Twitter mobs, Facebook mobs, and flash mobs.

Every active conservative should spend some time on social media sites to see liberals whipping each other into a frenzy. Know your enemy — and if you don’t like the word “enemy” (I don’t), consider what Saul Alinsky calls you. You may not consider yourself their enemy, but that’s how they think about you. Ignore it at your peril.

This is David Axelrod’s specialty of astroturfing. Obama has become O’mobba: he is the first president in history to give his official public blessing to “idealistic” anti-capitalist mobs.

There is no doubt that these organized “spontaneous” mobs will be used in the election campaign. Be prepared to face nasty, vicious lowbrow mobs with iPhones and iPads.

The poopers last week dumped a tub full of their diapers’ products in a Chase ATM vestibule in Lower Manhattan. They have finally discovered their bottom line.

They are now talking about the revolutionary necessity for violence. An Occumobster from Austin, TX recently wrote to USA Today promising to “take up … guns and storm Wall Street and our nation’s capitals.” Don’t doubt that this is a deliberate, purposeful campaign, designed to frighten and dehumanize normal people (like Tea Party members) in order to keep the radical left in power.

The Occupy Movement sprung back into public view last night the only way they knew how–by staging a violent clash with police on the streets. Like a spoiled child who has learned that throwing a temper tantrum is the only way to get attention, the movement used the confluence of the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street and the intoxicated party atmosphere of St. Patrick’s Day to launch an attempted re-taking of Zuccotti Park. The move was predictable because Occupy had openly discussed a few weeks ago that they needed more ‘direct actions’ as way to refill their dwindling financial coffers.
Just as predictable as the chaos. however, was the reaction of the media. Take the politically active Buzzfeed, where the article title tells you what you need to know: Occupy Arrests Are Good News For The Movement.

The clash last night between New York police and members of Occupy Wall Street was the best thing to happen to the protest movement in months.

The flagship New York branch of the leaderless movement attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park last night to mark the movement’s six-month anniversary. Police arrested 73 people as they removed protesters from the park, which is owned by a local real estate company.

The movement, left for dead by the press for months, is back in the news and on Twitter today. Protesters have been staging direct actions all winter but none have made headlines outside of advocacy journalism outlets until now. And that’s because last night resulted in dramatic photos and a considerable number of arrests — the kind of outcome that, as loath as most protesters are to admit it, is more likely to get them covered by reporters than a protest involving putting living room furniture in a bank branch, for example. And more media attention means an uptick in energy for the protesters, and vice versa.

“I think the past week the energy has been consistently ramping up,” said organizer Max Berger.

Of course, these latest clashes were completely predictable to anyone paying attention to Occupy because they said they needed to do them to raise funds.

“What people have been figuring out how to do is to move the protest into the neighborhoods, into the workplaces, into the schools.” ~Piven

2. OCCUPY FORECLOSED HOMES AND FACTORIES: Broaden agenda to those most affected by the economic collapse.

“I think, in the end, it may turn out that evicting the occupations was the precipitant of expanding the movement, because the movement’s agenda has broadened, and they’re now experimenting with reoccupying foreclosed homes, for example, with ways of rallying to the defense of workers who are locked out or on strike.”~Piven

3. RECRUIT YOUTH: Use the Universities and Professors as spearheads of Recruitment to broaden movement.

“And with the spring, I think there’s going to be a lot of protest in the universities and the colleges. Young people are very responsive to the appeals of Occupy, to their cultural style.”~Piven

4. ORGANIZE WITH LABOR: Further integration between Occupy and the traditional Unions, teamsters and community organizing, leftist organizations.

“And I think it’s part of how we think about combining the horizontal energy and vision and passion of Occupy with the more vertical traditional community- and labor-based groups. And when the two of them meet, we’ll get the combustion of saying Wall Street is drowning the country, and they’re doing it in neighborhoods and communities all over.”~Lerner

>5. OCCUPY DEMOCRATS: Specifically target the DNC convention, being held at Bank Of America Arena, to make a point that this is not a partisan movement. In spite of the fact that scores of Democrats have praised the Occupy movement, including President Obama.

“And occupiers and community groups and environmentalists and people from all over the country are going to be coming to Charlotte. And in a way, I think we can think about it as the first convention.”~Lerner

6. BUY STOCK: An example is given by Learner of “a lot of people” buying shares of Bank Of America and taking their shares to the annual shareholders meetings in San Francisco to vote on new polices for the company. This is named The Confront Corporate Power Movement.

“Bank of America shares were recently down to $5, so a lot of people have bought stock and are planning to go to that meeting and try to be citizen shareholder—taxpayer shareholders, and have a say.”~Lerner

Congress just made Barack Obama even more of an imperial president. They didn’t give him a purple robe and a jeweled crown and scepter, but they might as well have, if a new law is enforced to the fullest.

For the first time in American history, Congress protected a President from lese majesté, a monarchical French phrase, meaning “an offense violating the dignity of a ruler as the representative of a sovereign power,” according to Merriam-Webster.

In February, Congress passed H.R. 347, the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Rooney, (R-Fla.). Obama signed it March 8. Among other things, it stipulates that anyone who “knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so” can be arrested and punished with up to 10 years in prison. It defines “restricted buildings or grounds” as “a building or grounds where the president or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting.”

The key, civil rights watchdogs have noticed, is that just one word was changed. “Willfully” was removed from before “knowingly.” Thus, federal law previously stipulated that anyone who “willfully or knowingly enters or remains,” etc.

This is significant because the federal government previously had to prove that a person intended to violate the law. Now, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, “knowingly,” is a violation.

So suppose President Obama’s motorcade is driving by your business, holding up traffic as it always does. You “knowingly” go to the window to see what all the horn honking is about. The Secret Service doesn’t like that, and arrests you, even though you didn’t “willfully” do anything wrong.

Key tests will come when the law is implemented, Ilya Shapiro told us. He’s senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute. “I could see a court seeing these regulations not being tailored enough,” he said. “For example, Congress can’t ban protests that are within 100 miles of the Nation’s Capital.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, the law is being called “the anti-Occupy bill,” referring to the Occupy Wall Street movement and similar left-wing groups, such as Occupy Oakland. But the law could also restrict the right to protest of conservative groups, such as the tea parties.

Sadly, this was a bipartisan bill. It passed unanimously in the U.S. Senate. In the U.S. House, only three members voted against it, all Republicans: Paul Broun of Georgia, Justin Amash of Michigan and Ron Paul of Texas, the GOP presidential candidate.

Moreover, H.R. 347 applies not just to the president, but to any “other person protected by the Secret Service,” which the law defines as, “any person whom the United States Secret Service is authorized to protect under section 3056 of this title or by presidential memorandum.”

So, if nutty Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad comes to New York City to give an address before the United Nations, and is authorized Secret Service protection, Americans could be arrested just for “knowingly” protesting outside.

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